SCHENECTADY — City schools Superintendent Larry Spring is continuing on his quest to change education aid by holding a forum Thursday that is similar to the large, regional gatherings that have been sponsored by the Statewide School Finance Consortium.

Spring has sent invitations to local officials and is advertising the 6:30 p.m. meeting at Mont Pleasant Middle School's library on the district's website. The meeting will include a presentation by Spring on his theory that minority-majority school districts in New York state are underfunded – and a session with English Language Arts teachers and librarians on how to write an "effective advocacy letter" to state officials. The school district is requesting that attendees register for Spring's meeting on its website to get a sense of how many people will be showing up.

"This is an opportunity to get folks to understand: this is what it means for your kids and our city," Spring said.

The superintendent has become vocal on the topic since leaving the Cortland city school district for Schenectady last June. He has met twice with state officials — catching people's attention with his discussion about race. Last Wednesday, Spring met with a state budget analyst and an attorney for Gov. Andrew Cuomo. He said that state staff appeared concerned about what his data showed. "They said, 'I can't promise you anything, but we hear you,'" Spring said.

Spring says that Schenectady only receives 54 percent of aid that it could legally collect under state statue while some other districts are receiving near 100 percent.

"The whiter a school district's student population is, the more likely the district is to receive full or close to full funding," the district wrote in an advertisement of the Thursday meeting.

Spring has also taken his case to city taxpayers, speaking after the State of the City address two weeks ago and noting that if the school district received a median percentage of state aid, at 82 percent of possible funding, it would lower property taxes by one-third.

As for the Statewide School Finance Consortium meetings, thousands of people attended them at Columbia High School and Niskayuna High School this month in which the consortium laid out its case about the need to increase funding to districts as they continue to close buildings and cut programs.